Saturday, July 21, 2012

Tomas de Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition return in a new era of suppression of freedom of thought and adherence to a rigid dogma – namely their own prejudices!

Lisa Pease’s six-page diatribe against me and my recent book Mary’s Mosaic is, at the very least, a marvel of subjective distortion and shoddy criticism, fueled by her own personal vendetta that someone dared not follow her as she, and her partner James DiEugenio, have attempted over the years to appoint themselves as the ultimate “guardians of truth” in all things Kennedy (see her CTKA review here).

And as usual, Lisa Pease’s only
fallback source in her vain attempts to substantiate anything she writes is
James DiEugenio, whom she seems to always regard as unassailable. Together,
nothing that these two write can ever be challenged or debated – without
one of them launching some kind of personal diatribe against anyone who
challenges it, establishing a different opinion. Indeed, during his last
appearance on Len Osanic’s "Black Op Radio" program (June 28, 2012), DiEugenio
gushes over “Lisa Pease’s wonderful – and I really think it’s a
really wonderful piece of work . . . because it’s done in her usual very intelligent,
very elegant, very incisive kind of a style. And I’m going to be doing Part II to which I am actually
working on right now . . .”
We wait with bated breath.

What’s particularly revealing in Pease’s latest
piece of writing is that she first announces to her readers that she “check[s]
every fact, . . . dare[ing] the author to prove his case to me,” and then goes
on to continue (along with her partner DiEugenio) to make the absurd claim that
JFK was not a womanizer, or sexually
promiscuous, but always “adorable and sweet,” (quoting Angela Greene). We are now, after years of revelation
by such authors as Ralph Martin, Seymour Hersh, Nigel Hamilton, and
Presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Robert Dallek – to say
nothing of the women who have come forward (the most recent is Mimi Beardsley
Alford in 2012) – supposed to go on believing “The Doctrine of Pease
and DiEugenio” that this was all just a “Republican Party” or “CIA” plot to
discredit President Kennedy. Following “the two McCarthyites of the JFK assassination
research community,” as one researcher recently put it, is like walking into a
never-ending fantasy world of ignorance, hopefully having been convinced that
the real truth has just been dispensed, when all that has taken place in this
case is Pease’s fabricating evidence in order to gin up “facts” to support her
delusions.

I am not going to try your patience as a reader
by writing six pages of rebuttal, though I easily could take issue with every
aspect of Pease’s tangled web of claims where she can’t even correctly restate
what I wrote. Indeed, it becomes clear that Pease’s greatest talent is
attempting to bestow upon her readers her own vitriolic projections that have
no basis or understanding of fact. In doing so, she identifies herself as an
intolerant critic who must torture (and therefore misconstrue) the facts in an
effort to win an argument, so typical of a fanatical mindset that can’t
consider any real alternative other than its own projections.

And so, despite the fact that there was absolutely no forensic
evidence whatsoever (as documented in the
FBI Crime Report, which was withheld from the defense until the beginning of
the trial nine months after the murder) linking Ray Crump, Jr. to the bloody
crime scene or to the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer, Lisa Pease wants her readers
to believe, as she does, that Ray Crump was actually guilty, because some of
the clothes he was wearing that day matched what eyewitness Henry Wiggins, Jr.
saw when he viewed the man standing over Meyer’s body within 30 seconds after
the two gunshots had ended her life. Wiggins was 126.5 feet away from the
murder scene. This was all documented in 1200 pages of trial transcript,
something that Pease fails to mention to her readers, because she never read or
studied it.

Still, Pease omnisciently claims
that in viewing just one picture of Ray Crump in my book, she (and she alone)
has decided to proclaim that Crump does, in fact, have a “medium build,” and
that Wiggins’ description is completely accurate. Wiggins obviously saw
somebody who wore similar clothes to Crump that day, but I maintain it wasn’t
Ray Crump. Then, ignoring everyone else’s disposition toward Crump, including
his attorney Dovey Roundtree, public defenders George Peter Lamb and Ted
O’Neill, and anyone else who actually had contact with Crump at the time of the
murder, Pease becomes convinced he was only acquitted because he had “a very
astute lawyer.” Never mind the lack of any real evidence, or the fact she was
shot execution-style with a gun that was never recovered, or that no one in Ray
Crump’s family or community had ever seen Crump with any firearm. To further
make her case, Pease invokes the authority of author Nina Burleigh, who like
Pease is sure of Ray Crump’s guilt, but who can’t even correctly document the
jury’s composition, in addition to a number of other important neglected facts.

Then, hanging her hat on the fact
that because Crump lied (he was concealing a tryst with a married woman) about
why he was in the vicinity of the
towpath that morning, this is further proof to Pease of Crump’s guilt.
Our Dick Cheneyesque “cherry-picker” of facts then takes her distorted
proclamations even further. Creating her own testimony, Pease suppresses that
Crump had an organic brain impairment before the murder took place and that he
was actively alcoholic, which in the perception of his attorney Dovey Roundtree
made him “incapable of clear communication,
incapable of complex thought, incapable of grasping the full weight of his
predicament, incapable most of all, of a murder executed with the stealth and
precision and forethought of Mary Meyer’s [murder].” (Mary’s Mosaic, p. 318).

Further
accusing me of concealing the fact that Crump had a criminal record
before the Meyer murder (which consisted of the unspeakable, heinous crime of
having been twice arrested for disorderly conduct, along with having served a
60-day jail sentence for shoplifting – all of which I mention on page 53),
Ms. Pease wants her followers to believe that because of Crump’s subsequent
career in crime, this is the ultimate sine qua non proof of Ray Crump’s having murdered Mary
Meyer. The only thing that becomes
clear here is that any psychological understanding and sophistication of the
human condition completely eludes Lisa Pease; she’s unable to comprehend how an
already psychologically impaired individual subjected to continued abuse over a
nine-month period in jail (which according to his attorney Dovey Roundtree
likely included sexual assaults) could damage someone to the point of becoming
a hardened criminal. And so in Pease’s fantasy world, nothing matters (or is
able to be grasped) except her distorted perception of her own opinions that
have no real basis in factual evidence.

But not yet content, Pease wants
her supporters to believe that all of this “illustrates Janney’s shortcomings
as a researcher.” She goes on to attempt to prove that I next have “distorted
the math” and time intervals in showing that there was a second “Negro male”
eluding capture by police immediately following Meyer’s murder. Either Pease
didn’t read carefully what I wrote, or she is intellectually challenged by the
English language. In either case, she proves only one thing: she hasn’t read
the trial transcript. Indeed, her own shortcomings as a researcher won’t even
allow her to be factually accurate when quoting what I wrote. “Detective Warner
arrested Crump at 1:15pm,” writes Pease, which is not only incorrect (and not
what I wrote), but reveals how little Pease actually understood what she read.

Very simply (Mary’s Mosaic, pp. 122-128), I demonstrate
through an extensive study of the trial transcript, and in an interview with
police officer Roderick Sylvis for this book, how he and his partner Frank
Bignotti arrived at Fletcher’s Boat House at approximately 12:30pm in order to
block the exits of anyone trying to leave the towpath area. That’s what they
were supposed to do: wait in their patrol car and guard the exits, a concept
that Lisa Pease again is unable to grasp.
They waited for about “four or five minutes” and then began hatching a
plan whereby Sylvis would begin walking eastward toward the murder scene via
the towpath and Bignotti would do the same along the adjacent railroad bed and
woods that separated the two. This planning and positioning of themselves,
according to Sylvis, took another five minutes or so. We are now at approximately 12:40pm. As soon as they started
out, the two officers spotted a young while couple walking westward on the
railroad tracks, who they then approached and began talking to. In an interview
with Sylvis in 2008, I asked him specifically how long this interrogation had
taken. “At least five minutes,
probably more,” said Sylvis. It is now conservatively past 12:45pm, and very
possibly later, approaching 1:00pm, before the two officers start their journey
eastward toward the murder scene.

Sylvis told the court that he
walked “approximately a mile east on the towpath, at which point he saw “a head
jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second . . .” (Mary’s Mosaic, p.123). When I queried Sylvis about how long it
took to walk the mile, he was very clear that he had walked “very slowly” and
vigilantly, intermittently stopping to peer into the woods, and periodically
calling out to his partner Frank Bignotti. During the interview, Sylvis told me he had to be have been
walking for “about twenty minutes.” In my book, I gave him the benefit of doubt
and stated that “it has to have been at least fifteen minutes or more” (p.
123), before he spotted the head of a second “Negro male.” That meant that the time was likely to
be at the very least 1:15pm (the time
Ray Crump was arrested, seven tenths of mile away) and likely significantly
later.

Yet in Lisa Pease’s reverie, this
too becomes incomprehensible for her to grasp. Furthermore, Ray Crump – according to the trial
transcript – was already in the company of Detective John Warner
sometime before 1:15pm at a location of
one tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. I maintain that it could have been as much as ten to fifteen
minutes before 1:15pm that Warner first spotted Crump (who Warner said “wasn’t
running” when he first spotted the about-to-be defendant), before he started
interrogating him – first asking him to produce his driver’s license,
which Warner studied, then asking him a series of seven questions, before
deciding that he would walk with Crump to his alleged fishing spot in order to
help him retrieve his fishing gear that Crump said had fallen into the Potomac
River. The trial transcript repeatedly documents that Crump was officially
arrested at approximately 1:15pm by Detective Bernie Crooke, but he was in the
company of Detective Warner before that time. Therefore, the “Negro male” spotted by officer Sylvis, who
successfully eluded capture by police, couldn’t have been the defendant Ray
Crump. This isn’t rocket science, but for the challenged Lisa Pease, it’s too
much to tolerate, given her desperation to find some way to discredit me,
whereby she finally resorts to attacking my educational credentials.

In addition, Ms. Pease can’t even
seem to fathom or consider how “Lt. William L. Mitchell,” a man who told police
he was jogging on the towpath when he passed Mary Meyer – allegedly
just before the murder took place – told police that a “Negro male”
matching Wiggins’ description was following her in an effort to frame Ray
Crump. “Mitchell” would then testify against Crump at the murder trial nine
months later in July 1965 as part of the CIA’s assassination operation. It
doesn’t seem to matter to Pease that “Mitchell” has never been able to be
located since the trial, or that his known address during that time was
documented as a “CIA safe house” by three separate former CIA employees. At the time of trial in July 1965,
Mitchell told a reporter that he had since retired from the military and was
now a mathematics instructor at Georgetown University – yet no record
of his employment there could ever be located, nor was there ever any bona-fide
military service record located for “Mitchell,” either in the Pentagon where he
was listed in the directory at the time of the murder, or in the main military
data base in St. Louis. This was thoroughly researched by the Peabody
Award-winning journalist Roger Charles, as discussed in my book, a fact that
Pease fails to mention in one of her many deliberate omissions, which also
included Damore’s consultation with L. Fletcher Prouty (as documented by
Damore’s attorney James H. Smith) to finally understand who “Mitchell” was,
before Damore confronted him. Of course, Lisa Pease is entitled to whatever
flawed point of view she wants to embrace, but she’s not entitled to her own
set of facts.

The rest of Pease’s long-winded
misstatements criticizing author Leo Damore, Timothy Leary, Robert Morrow,
Gregory Douglas and other sources who I attempted to unravel – explicitly noting their deficiencies and
limitations – completely obfuscates the clarity of the emerging
picture: Placed in a larger context, and juxtaposed with firm documentation,
the aggregate unfolding scenario clearly indicates that Mary Meyer’s life was
ended by a CIA assassination. But in the Pease-DiEugenio fantasy world, people
are either all white or all black, complete truth-tellers or liars, completely
reliable or unreliable. There are no shades of grey; there is no ambiguity; and
there is no room for the analysis of intricacy and complexity.

And this is why the
Pease-DiEugenio brand of journalistic sophistication (or lack thereof) can’t
seem to fathom how JFK advisor Kenneth P. O’Donnell could somehow go on the
official record after the 1976 National Enquirer exposé about the Meyer-Kennedy affair and defend the shining Camelot
myth in his attempt to negate that there had been a romantic affair between
Mary Pinchot Meyer and President Kennedy; yet only a year later, shortly before
his death, confide to author Leo Damore some of the intimate details of their
relationship. In the same way that O’Donnell never talked publically about how
the FBI had discounted his testimony that the Presidential motorcade in Dallas
was driving into an ambush where at least two shots had come “from behind the
fence [on the grassy knoll],” in frontof the motorcade, O’Donnell only mentioned this reality to insiders,
which was confirmed twenty-five years later by Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill
in his 1987 memoir Man of The House.
Both Leo Damore and his attorney James H. Smith worked on one of O’Donnell’s
Massachusetts gubernatorial campaigns where the three had become good friends.
Yet Lisa Pease can’t fathom that there were many things O’Donnell didn’t want
to share publically, and would only confide privately to the people he trusted.

Fabricating evidence is a fatal
error for any kind of investigative reporter or critic. What kind of a mindset
(or person) would do this? Only a callow, dogmatic “true believer” in the
childish Camelot myth, who cannot tolerate being challenged, resorts to a
riddled analysis that is filled with factual errors and deliberate omissions
and misstatements. This episode in their increasingly virulent and intolerant
criticism is both tragic and unfortunate, because some (but not all) of the
work of Pease and DiEugenio has made a significant contribution to JFK
assassination historical research.

For example, James DiEugenio’s
deconstruction of Chris Matthew’s recent book on JFK was an insightful analysis
of a flawed work. In addition, DiEugenio and Pease together edited a useful
anthology of articles on the assassinations of the 1960s. However, what they
have done to Mary’s Mosaic is all too
similar to what they do to other first-time authors writing about the JFK
assassination: they delight in subjecting those who dare to write about the
Kennedy assassination (in a way that conflicts with their own historical
interpretations) to the “CTKA buzz-saw.”

So, readers and followers beware
(those of you who have the patience to read many of their long and pompous
reviews): these two Los Angelinos have an extremely inflated opinion of their
own importance in the JFK assassination debate. Fortunately, books last; and
reviews are forgotten weeks after they are written (if not sooner). Moreover,
we are living in the 21st century. In spite of the fact that Pease
and DiEugenio would surely resurrect book burnings for those works of which
they disapprove – establishing a modern-day JFK assassination Index
Librorum Prohibitorum if they could do
so –modern-day JFK researchers and the American public do not hunger for
another Torquemada or Cardinal Bellarmine. I dare say that if Pease and
DiEugenio had been in charge of Galileo’s heresy trial in Rome, he would have
been sentenced to burn at the stake, instead of to the life imprisonment (house
arrest) levied on him by the Holy Office.

Peter Janney grew up in Washington, DC, during the 1950s and 1960s. His father was a high-ranking CIA official and a close friend of Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton, and Mary’s husband, Cord Meyer. His mother and Mary Meyer were classmates at Vassar College.